HC Deb 04 March 1902 vol 104 cc383-6

I am, therefore, going to ask the House of Commons to look these facts in the face. I am going to ask the House to take a great plunge, in regard both to the terms of service and to the pay of the Army. I believe it to be a safe, judicious, and necessary measure. I cannot help asking myself, not what is the longest time for which a soldier prefers to enlist, but what is the longest time, consistent with the will of the best class of men to engage, for which you can ask men to join your standard. The success of the three years term has been so great that we propose from now to allow every man of every force in His Majesty's service, except the Household Cavalry, to enlist for three years, with nine years in the reserve. We also propose to meet the special calls which must come from India and the Colonies. We have yearly a large number of drafts made up. We do not send men to India until they are, or we believe them to be, twenty years of age. We cannot send men either to India or the Colonies who are not properly trained, and it will not pay us to send three years men to India. Therefore we have to consider what inducement can be offered to a man who is engaged for three years to give us the necessary service in India or abroad. We find that inducement naturally in the question of pay. At present when the soldier joins he gets into his pocket at the end of the week nominally 9d. a day, but with stoppages—which are less at the beginning of his service—you may call it 8d. a day. When he has passed his recruiting stage and is nineteen years of age, there are messing allowances, which bring up the amount to 3d. more. Therefore, cutting out the recruiting period and reckoning front the time when a man becomes a soldier, or can be put into the ranks at nineteen years of age, at present what he draws on Saturday is about 10d. a day. Tenpence a day seems to me hardly to represent, considering the rise of wages outside, a sufficient inducement to the soldier. I remember very well hearing General Wauchope say on a platform not many months before he left this country to go to South Africa, and just after his return from Sudan— I have felt positively ashamed at the amount of work I have had to order these men to do under a tropical sun at 10d. a day.

Tenpence a day has got us most admirable material, but the question is whether for the last 10,000 men we require we cannot get even better material by paying a little more. This is what we propose to do. We propose, in the first place, that the 2d. which is now deducted from the shilling shall be given to the whole Army from April 1st of this year, and the whole shilling shall be given to every recruit as soon as he has passed the recruiting drill and is certified to be nineteen years of age.

Then comes the question of providing the drafts. What we propose is this. After two years service every man may make his election, either he may go to the reserve as he originally agreed to do after three years service and continue in the reserve for nine years, or he may elect to go on and to complete eight years with the colours and then go to the reserve for four years. If he elects to abide by the original engagement, he will remain on at his rate of pay of one shilling a day. If he elects to go on, subject to a proviso which I will mention directly, he will be given, if he is an efficient soldier, 6d. extra a day, making 1s. 6d. in all, from the time he has completed two years service until he leaves the colours. There are two provisos. In the first place, an inefficient soldier or a soldier of bad character will not be allowed by his commanding officer to re-engage. We have reason to believe that nothing militates so much against good soldiers joining our ranks as the fact that there are one or two bad characters in the barrack room who lower the tone of the whole force. We want to put it in the power of the commanding officer to stop such men going on, and to add to that category the men who are either saturated with disease or with alcoholism. These men go to pieces in a tropical climate, and we propose to rid the Army of them at the end of their three years service. The second proviso is with regard to shooting. If we are to give a man much better pay than before, we shall in these days, when everything depends on shooting, require him to be at least an average shot. We propose to raise the standard from the third class to the second class, and to have only two classes in future—the efficient shot and the inefficient shot. Unless a man can get into the efficient class he will get only 4d. a day extra instead of 6d. a day at the end of two years, and he will remain at that until he can get into the efficient class. Subject to these two provisos, however, every man will be allowed to re-engage and to obtain is. 6d. a day after two years service.

We have also made up our minds to reconstruct the present operation of good conduct pay. Good conduct pay was supposed to be not only an inducement to good conduct, but an inducement to recruiting. I think the fact that the pay depended entirely on the opinion formed of the man in the regiment may have had a good effect on the men in the Army, but I doubt whether the fact that good conduct pay could be obtained after two years had any effect as an inducement to enlist. We propose to alter the present arrangements with regard to good conduct pay, not to abolish good conduct badges, but to allow the commanding officer after two years to give a man a badge without pay, and, should the man have a subsequent slip, he would be deprived of the badge, but he would be in a category better than the man who had not a badge, because the latter, not having a badge, would be fined. Therefore, the man with a badge would be a penny better off than the man without a badge. I am afraid I have not made that perfectly clear. At the present moment good conduct pay consists in giving a man a penny a day after two years service. We propose that a man may be fined a penny for bad conduct, but the man who has the badge will only lose the badge, and not be fined. At five years, as at present, he can get a second badge, carrying ld. extra with it. We propose that a man shall not be fined in any of his pay so long as he has a badge to lose.

I do not want to labour this subject of pay, but I should like the House to consider it for a moment longer. I say at once that it is impossible for us to estimate the effect of the rise of pay directly upon recruiting. But I say also that it will be universally admitted that a rise from 10d. to is. 6d. per day is a great jump in the pay of the soldier. If you take a person in civil life who is engaged like the soldier, who is lodged, clothed, and fed, as, for instance, a footman, you may get a young and inexperienced footman for, say, £20 a year. I think that nobody will deny that if you offer £24 a year at once, with a certainty of getting £36 a year two years later, and a further chance of promotion, such as you offer in the Army, you will undoubtedly get a better class man. If that is so in civil life, it ought to be so to some extent in the Army.